But to start with he must say farewell to these wonderfully considerate young priests, who had done their best to help him, and allowed him to live among them almost as a fellow priest. First, he visited Father O’Shea, with whom he had formed a friendly relationship. “I regret that I am going to leave you,” he said.
“When?” asked the priest, looking at him calmly and appraisingly. “You have been called away or something?” he asked lazily.
“Something,” René replied. Father O’Shea had no very strong missionary impulses. He had been a seminarian; but he had preferred not to enter the priesthood, he had gone into business instead.That is how he began.“Life in an office, however,” he had explained to René, “obliged me to become a lickspittle, to abase myself to such continuous servility that I gave it up and returned to my original idea of becoming a priest. In a primitive democracy such as we enjoy in our community life here at the college, it may not be an ideal type of existence for every kind of man, but at least one does not have to lick the shoes of half-a-dozen lousy power-addicts every morning, and offer one’s bottom to be kicked.”
Canadian business life, like American business life, is of a somewhat Oriental type. The big shot haughtily isolates himself, and all the department heads under him follow his example, exacting as much servility as it is possible to extract from a human being. It may be that Big Money is somewhat more democratic in the States at present; but in Canada these conditions still fearfully flourish. Father O’Shea’s experience was in no way an unusual one. Just what Father O’Shea did not say was that his clothes were of the most expensive cloth — and although the deep black was obligatory, it was very becoming to Father O’Shea. Then he smuggled over from Buffalo numbers of excellent cigars. Economic worries were unknown to him — no income tax, no rent, no keeping up with the Joneses. He was one of the priests who did a great deal of work over in Buffalo, where he would make his way in the college car with his small grip — which was never examined by the customs officers, who were all Catholic to a man — Poles or Wops or Germans. So it seemed to René that this priest did not have so bad a life — especially in view of the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was a study he greatly enjoyed. Lastly, he was an ambitious man, and would no doubt go to headquarters before very long, and might end as the head of the Order of St. Maurice.
The young priest, whose horizons were far wider than the walls of a seminary, admired the worldly success of René, approved in his private mind of René’s departure: for to stop much longer in this neck of the woods would have reduced René in his estimation. “I didn’t think you could stick it so long here,” he said, smiling.
“The peace here is terrific. You are so used to it that you fail to appreciate it,” René told him.
Father O’Shea stretched his arms out to their full length, as he said with a sleepy yawn, “Gosh, I could do with a little less peace sometimes.”
As René was leaving the cell, Father O’Shea enquired, “You said you were becoming a Catholic. You have not given up the idea, I hope?”
“Ah, no,” said René. “Quite soon, when my mind is entirely at peace, I shall be reading those books you gave me.” He looked up at the priest suddenly, with an expression which startled Father O’Shea. “But there is no peace for me, I should tell you. I see a fiery mist wherever I direct my eyes. But the fire is not outside me, the fire is in my brain.”
Father O’Shea blinked. “You had a bad break, René. You ought to see a physician.”
Father Moody, the enthusiast, the bright-eyed missionary, was disappointed, but he made no reference to this at all. He had cherished the hope that this well-known professor and author would move into the Roman communion within those four walls. But Professor Harding might return to the Sacred Heart, might he not? And he lavished his innocent flatteries upon the departing visitor. O’Neill, who shared the disappointment of the registrar, shared it genteelly. The colourless but amiable Superior concealed his satisfaction that this prolonged visit was drawing to a close. An orthodox period for visitors (who did not usually dress in a cassock) was at most three days, not almost three long months.
It should perhaps be added that a couple of weeks after René’s departure a cheque was received by the Registrar for a small sum representing the fees for lectures which René had delivered during his stay at the college. So that possible indiscretion, retrospectively, was eliminated.
XXXIV
THE CEMETERY OF SHELLS
Back in Momaco, René found himself, as he put it, among bowed heads and muted voices. He was received as a man struck down, and, rumour had it, actually crazed with grief. He was looked at rather timidly, as though he might, unless handled very carefully, bite. He was obliged to improvise a technique, in order to cope with all this misunderstanding: for he regarded it as preferable not to say, “My dear sir, you are mistaken: My wife was a selfish, scheming old bag, whose death placed me in a very awkward position.” Self-defensively he accepted the rule of a grief-stricken husband. They were capable of dismissing him from the university (at the instance of the wives of the members of the board) if he showed himself otherwise than paralysed with uxorious sorrow. When someone came up to him and began offering him, in a choked voice, his heartfelt sympathy, René just answered with a muffled gasp and an hysterical squeeze of the hand. Sometimes his squeeze was so painfully compressive, though, and the noise he made in his throat was so fierce, that the would-be mourner would say afterwards, “I think that man’s mind has been turned by what he has gone through. He seizes one’s hand like some wild animal.”
With McKenzie, whom he trusted like a brother, he was quite explicit. “I am not heartbroken. I have no sensation of grief whatever. I have thought all that out, since I came out of the hospital. The fire at the Hotel Blundell, and still more the other things associated with the fire, left my wife a little mental. I did my best; she just set herself to obstruct everything, as if she were possessed. Her death was her last act of obstruction. Also it showed how deeply her reason had been affected. — We had got to such a pitch just before she threw herself under the truck that it seemed to be a matter of her life or mine, almost. For I understand a great many things that she could not, and she wanted to drag me down into her backwater, and into modes of life from which I had rescued myself, into a decaying society, into the rotten old dreamlands of her youth. She clung to me like a drowning woman, and her suicide was her last effort to drag me under. So you see … but I must put on a mask of grief for these good Momacoans. It is a bore, but they would think me an awful brute if I did not do so.”This was quite a temperate, quite normal-sounding statement, and McKenzie accepted it as all there was to know about this sad affair. He never asked himself whether René had not been associated with his wife in a neuropathic duet.
Meanwhile, with a feverish energy, René proceeded with the work of digging himself in with concrete and steel, so that no change of fortune could overtake him again. The successful “young” historian of the old days in London was one man — buoyant, elastic, inventive, and fearless: the present man, professor of history at the University of Momaco, Dominion of Canada, was quite another. He no longer even believed in his theories of a new approach to history; that had almost become a racket; for him it had all frozen into a freak anti-historical museum, of which he was the keeper, containing many libelous waxworks of famous kings and queens. He carried on mechanically with what the bright, rushing, idealistic mind of another man had begun.The man of former days had been replaced by a machine, which was a good imitation of the reality, which had superficially much of the charm, even the vivacity of the living model, but, when it came to one of the acid tests of authenticity, it would be recognized as an imposture.
If the personality is emptied of mother-love, emptied of wife-love, emptied of the illusions upon which sex-in-society depends, and finally emptied of the illusions upon which the will to create depends, then the personality becomes a shell. In René’s case that daring and defiant act, the
resignation of his professorship in 1939, had made imperative the acquisition of something massive to counterbalance the loss, else disequilibrium could not but ensue. But, reacting with bitterness to criticism, he began hurling overboard the conventional ballast, mother-love going first.
The process of radical revaluation, the process which was responsible for the revolutionary character of his work, that analysis, turned inwards (upon, for instance, such things as the intimate structure of domestic life), this furious analysis began disintegrating many relationships and attitudes which only an exceptionally creative spirit, under very favourable conditions, can afford to dispense with. Into this situation came world war, came also Canada, with all that means; came the three years in the Hotel Blundell — three, mortal, barren, desolating years. A major hotel fire put a violent close to that period and so far nothing irretrievable had happened. The man who left England in the summer of 1939 was still there. If only latent, what was necessary for full vitality was intact. It was from that point onwards that either the personality had to reflower, as it were, or there must be degeneration. There was nothing that compelled degeneration — it was the bitter struggle that then began which led to it. The incipient dementia of his wife, and the pressure of its unreason upon him; another pressure from within, namely the pressure of his own will-to-success, of the most vulgar type, these pressures, both irrational and both touched with dementia, brought into being, as has been seen, something insanely militant, from which the finer inspirations of his intellect shrank, and with which his original self found it impossible to coexist.
There was this too; whatever he might say, he had been deprived of his natural audience; it is not until he loses it that a man of letters, or of ideas, knows how much he depends upon the deep cultural soil in which he has grown, or upon that atmosphere and that climate of thought. His withdrawal from that into an outlandish culture-less world (as he, even more than Hester, felt it to be), the long obliterating years of the war; in the end, the necessity of accepting this tenth-rate alternative to what had been his backgrounds before his resignation — all of this deeply disillusioning situation had, first of all, impaired, and, a little later, injured irreparably his creative will. He was half-way through that process while he and McKenzie were working upon the foundations of his new enterprise. Such a process does not proceed illuminated by consciousness, where it may be watched, and where steps may be taken, perhaps, to arrest it. So it was that one day consciousness asserted itself, and René discovered that he was only a half-crazed replica of his former self. He did actually perceive this for a moment, and then it was swallowed up by other emotions; but the revelation, which had horrified him, was not obliterated.
It was not, of course, at all as a wreck, or as a gutted shell or as an empty hangover of himself, that he appeared to himself or to anybody else. Naturally he continued to live as if there had been no such tragic fracture of the personality. There was still enough animal vitality in the shell, and enough residue of ambitious intellectual potency to carry on “brilliantly” with his professional duties, carefully to pilot himself through the social shallows of Momaco (with enough, but just enough, control not to explode, amorously or vituperatively, and to wreck everything); to pass pleasant hours with the McKenzies, to conduct his business efficiently with New York. McKenzie was very attached to him, and though he could not fail to notice an alteration he disregarded it: there were plenty of things in the immediate past amply to account for quite a lot of change if it made its appearance. McKenzie felt that the new haunted look was only temporary.
René was tenacious of rules; there was no slackening in his observance of the rules for the conduct of his life which he occasionally formulated. He had laid it down that there must, under no circumstances, be another marriage. Introducing into his life a new factor, charged with all the potency of sex and all its unpredictability, would not be in the interests of security: and to the ideal of material security he was dedicated. He was surrounded by attractive, unmarried women, and his temperament was at boiling point. So he found this rule very irksome.
The loneliness he experienced at this period was almost indescribable. To start with, it was now for the first time that he comprehended what it meant to be an exile. On the one hand, like his dead wife before him, he suffered from an unceasing ache for the old condition of things, and for the English scene; which, of course, he promptly pulverized with the same arguments he had employed with Hester. This was very unpleasant and very unexpected. On the other hand, his loneliness produced, temporarily, a quite violent antipathy to the Canadian. He had to make a rule about this: it was to the effect that he must never regard a Canadian as anything but a Briton disguised with an American accent, and an anti-British bias as big as a house. In any case, the vacuum left by the departed Hester was large, darksome, and chilling. The temptation to provide himself with a human buffer against the environing cold (within and without) was at times painful. But, in the event, all he did for himself in that direction was to spend such time as he had to spare with a chocolate-eyed Peasoup, of course in another quarter of the city.
The fire in his brain, of which he had spoken to Father O’Shea, would sometimes kindle in the most startling fashion. He would be very near to bursting out of this cage he had constructed for himself, with a shriek of rage which would have frozen the blood of Momaco. He was probably prevented from doing this by a minor explosion when he was alone with McKenzie one evening, the latter’s wife being on a motoring trip with the Rushforths. This came about quite suddenly.
“The success of your book has been tremendous,” McKenzie had remarked. “I believe I am even more pleased about this than you are yourself.”
“I am perfectly sure you are,” René coldly sneered.
“Oh dear! Is that how you feel!”McKenzie looked embarrassed.
“Yes, I feel like that ... very much like that,” René answered evenly, as if he were repeating something. “The success ... the tremendous success, of which you speak, does not make my heart beat faster. As a matter of fact, when I think of it, I feel a little sick.” He leapt to his feet. McKenzie could only see his face in profile, but it was pulled in all directions, he could see, as a result of some mental convulsion.
“No! I feel a tremendous nausea at my tremendous success. I am sick — I am terribly sick; and I am bored” — his voice became suddenly guttural. “I am not bored, no, I am not bored, I am butchered.”
But when the French houseboy arrived to sweep away the empty coffee cups, he shouted, “Et toi! n’est-ce pas que tu es emmerdé par l’hospitalité du locataire! N’est-ce pas qu’il est emmerdeur!”
Balancing the cups, the houseboy jazzed out of the room.
“B-o-r-e-d — never speak to me of boredom again. I’m split down the middle with dreary horror — I am squashed flat with the horrible weight of boredom! My body is in a torturer’s press, the bones are being squeezed through the skin; my mind as well, it is in a malignant vice. It is not my body, it is my mind that is in the press.” He stared round at his friend. “Yes, Ian, I am in a torture chamber, not in a yawning gallery. My book, my wonderful book! I hope my book bores everybody as much as I am ... as much as I soon shall be ... soon be croaked with the stink of this manhole.” He looked down with a bleak grin at McKenzie. “Ian, cheer up! I killed a student yesterday who said ‘Aw, Professor, don’t you ever want to yell, Professor?’”
McKenzie, very uneasy, produced a polite laugh. “You were quite right to kill that student. I have been wanting to do so for some time. But, René, don’t be silly about your book. It is a very fine book indeed …”
“Stop!” René panted in the bass-de profundis — an involuntary command. He dropped back upon the sofa, where he had been sitting, as if dropped by somebody who just now had violently snatched him up, as if a supernatural being had whipped him up into the standing position, forced his terror-struck “Stop!” out of him: and now had dropped him back on to the sofa with a gravitationa
l thud.
McKenzie was a sober man, not prone to feyness, but he experienced the presence of the supernatural. He seemed to intuit that poor René had been dropped back — that some power (and he felt an evil power) was responsible for the behaviour of the body of his friend, which had become an automaton. And he responded to the word “Stop!” as he would to the command of a god. His tongue froze to his palate, he sat stock-still.
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